Benjamin franklin and albert einstein, this is the exclusive biography of steve jobs

New York Times
columnist Tom Friedman to discuss how to 
draw lines without looking like a censor. He asked Friedman to head an advisory group to help 
come up with guidelines, but the columnist’s publisher said it would be a conflict of interest, and 
no such committee was formed.
The pornography ban also caused problems. “We believe we have a moral responsibility to 
keep porn off the iPhone,” Jobs declared in an email to a customer. “Folks who want porn can buy 
an Android.”
This prompted an email exchange with Ryan Tate, the editor of the tech gossip site Valleywag. 
Sipping a stinger cocktail one evening, Tate shot off an email to Jobs decrying Apple’s heavy-
handed control over which apps passed muster. “If Dylan was 20 today, how would he feel about 
your company?” Tate asked. “Would he think the iPad had the faintest thing to do with 
‘revolution’? Revolutions are about freedom.”
To Tate’s surprise, Jobs responded a few hours later, after midnight. “Yep,” he said, “freedom 
from programs that steal your private data. Freedom from programs that trash your battery. 
Freedom from porn. Yep, freedom. The times they are a changin’, and some traditional PC folks 
feel like their world is slipping away. It is.”

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In his reply, Tate offered some thoughts on Flash and other topics, then returned to the 
censorship issue. “And you know what? I don’t want ‘freedom from porn.’ Porn is just fine! And I 
think my wife would agree.”
“You might care more about porn when you have kids,” replied Jobs. “It’s not about freedom, 
it’s about Apple trying to do the right thing for its users.” At the end he added a zinger: “By the 
way, what have you done that’s so great? Do you create anything, or just criticize others’ work 
and belittle their motivations?”
Tate admitted to being impressed. “Rare is the CEO who will spar one-on-one with customers 
and bloggers like this,” he wrote. “Jobs deserves big credit for breaking the mold of the typical 
American executive, and not just because his company makes such hugely superior products: Jobs 
not only built and then rebuilt his company around some very strong opinions about digital life, 
but he’s willing to defend them in public. Vigorously. Bluntly. At two in the morning on a 
weekend.” Many in the blogosphere agreed, and they sent Jobs emails praising his feistiness. Jobs 
was proud as well; he forwarded his exchange with Tate and some of the kudos to me.
Still, there was something unnerving about Apple’s decreeing that those who bought their 
products shouldn’t look at controversial political cartoons or, for that matter, porn. The humor site 
eSarcasm.com launched a “Yes, Steve, I want porn” web campaign. “We are dirty, sex-obsessed 
miscreants who need access to smut 24 hours a day,” the site declared. “Either that, or we just 
enjoy the idea of an uncensored, open society where a techno-dictator doesn’t decide what we can 
and cannot see.”
At the time Jobs and Apple were engaged in a battle with Valleywag’s affiliated website, 
Gizmodo, which had gotten hold of a test version of the unreleased iPhone 4 that a hapless Apple 
engineer had left in a bar. When the police, responding to Apple’s complaint, raided the house of 
the reporter, it raised the question of whether control freakiness had combined with arrogance.
Jon Stewart was a friend of Jobs and an Apple fan. Jobs had visited him privately in February 
when he took his trip to New York to meet with media executives. But that didn’t stop Stewart 
from going after him on 
The Daily Show.
“It wasn’t supposed to be this way! Microsoft was 
supposed to be the evil one!” Stewart said, only half-jokingly. Behind him, the word “appholes” 
appeared on the screen. “You guys were the rebels, man, the underdogs. But now, are you 
becoming The Man? Remember back in 1984, you had those awesome ads about overthrowing 
Big Brother? Look in the mirror, man!”
By late spring the issue was being discussed among board members. “There is an arrogance,” 
Art Levinson told me over lunch just after he had raised it at a meeting. “It ties into Steve’s 
personality. He can react viscerally and lay out his convictions in a forceful manner.” Such 
arrogance was fine when Apple was the feisty underdog. But now Apple was dominant in the 
mobile market. “We need to make the transition to being a big company and dealing with the 
hubris issue,” said Levinson. Al Gore also talked about the problem at board meetings. “The 
context for Apple is changing dramatically,” he recounted. “It’s not hammer-thrower against Big 
Brother. Now Apple’s big, and people see it as arrogant.” Jobs became defensive when the topic 
was raised. “He’s still adjusting to it,” said Gore. “He’s better at being the underdog than being a 
humble giant.”
Jobs had little patience for such talk. The reason Apple was being criticized, he told me then, 
was that “companies like Google and Adobe are lying about us and trying to tear us down.” What 
did he think of the suggestion that Apple sometimes acted arrogantly? “I’m not worried about 
that,” he said, “because we’re not arrogant.”